Part of a larger project on Soviet cinema's transition to sound, this talk will consider the way sound operates in the first Soviet musical--Igor' Savchenko's 1934 film The Accordion (Garmon'). This paper argues that in Savchenko's film, sound on film technology subordinates the bodily movements of the characters, subjecting the new disciplined Soviet bodies to a rhythm whose source is located elsewhere, both inside (diegetic) and outside (extra-diegetic) of the image track.

Lilya Kaganovsky is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of How the Soviet Man Was Unmade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), and articles on gender and masculinity in Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and reviews films for the on-line journal KinoKultura. Her current projects include a book on Soviet cinema's transition to sound, and, together with Masha Salazkina, a co-edited volume on sound, music, and speech in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema.